Nicola (Georgia Groome) is enjoying life and has a steady and loving relationship with her boyfriend, Adam (Barney White). But when a bar owner threatens to upload footage he filmed of Nicola at an Ibiza party, she decides to fight back. Determined not to be “slut shamed”, Nicola posts the material online herself and sits back to watch the fallout.

The result is initially predictable – her boyfriend is devastated, her elder sister Gina (Amy Dunn) is beside herself with disapproval, the trolls get trolling and the world’s media gathers to condemn a young woman who dares to flout social norms about how women behave. But with the help (or you might say meddling) of her media-savvy younger sister, Chloe (Alice Hewkin), Nicola sees a way of turning the situation to her own financial advantage.

Recognising that it’s her girl-next-door ordinariness that has made her an online hit, Nicola is soon raking it in with her own YouTube-style channel in which, rather than sharing her makeup tips or H&M purchases, she models sex toys and is filmed masturbating. Nicola sees herself as crusader for sex without shame and judgment, a feminist icon.

Alice Birch: ‘Being called an armchair feminist made me furious’

Read more

Or is she just a woman with an eye for profit? As the family-run business expands, and she opens a string of sex booths across the capital in which couples film themselves copulating, issues surrounding privacy, revenge porn, coercion and consent soon come to the fore. It turns out that sex is more of a feminist issue than the self-justifying Nicola ever considered.

There have been a number of shows exploring pornography from a female perspective, including Rash Dash and Alice Birch’s We Want You to Watch at the NT. Clickbait is topical and raises pertinent issues around double standards towards women, the separation of pornography from prostitution and consensual sexual activity. But it significantly misfires because playwright Milly Thomas’s inexperience shows in a scenario that is mind-bogglingly improbable and features characters so thinly drawn and disagreeable that it’s hard to take it or them seriously.

Holly Race Roughan’s production does no favours, failing in the pitch of the performances and in tone: at times taking itself seriously and at others having a more heightened surreal and comic edge. The latter is preferable, although the repetitive masked trolling sequences soon pall, the late bid for sympathy for Nicola is unconvincing and only Emma D’Arcy as Nicola’s nemesis, Kat, emerges with any acting credit.